Card Range To Study

17 Cards in this Set

a mental shortcut through which people begin with a rough estimation as a starting point and then adjust this estimate to take into account unique characteristics of the present situation

Attribution theories

theories designed to explain how people determine the causes of behavior

Augmenting principle

The judgemental rule that states that if an event occurs depite the presence of strong opposing forces, we should give more weight to those possible causes that lead toward the event

Availability heuristic

a mental shortcut through which one estimates the likelihood of an event by the ease with which instances of that event come to mind

Cognitive heuristic

a mental shortcut used to make a judgement

Correspondence bias (fundamental attribution error)

the tendency for observers to overestimate the causal influence of personality factors on behavior and to underestimate the causal role of situational influences

Correspondent inference theory

the theory that proposes that people determine whether a behavior corresponds to an actor's internal disposition by asking whether 1) the behavior was intended, 2) the behavior's consequences were foreseeable, 3) the behavior was freely chosen, and 4) the behavior occured despite countervialing forces

Covariation model

the theory that proposes that people determine the cause of an actor's behavior by assessing whether other people act in similar ways (consensus), the actor behaves similarly in similar situations (distinctiveness), and the actor behaves similarly in the same situation

Discounting principle

the judgmental rule that states that as the umber of possible causes for and event increases, our confidence that any particular cause is the true one should decrease

Dispositional inference

the judgment that a person's behavior has been caused bu an aspect of that person's personality

Downward social comparison

the process of comaparing ourselves with those who are less well off

False consensus effect

the tendency to overestimate the extent to which others agree with us

Representative heuristic

a mental shortcut through which people classify something as belonging to a certain category to the extent that it is similar to a typical case from that category

Self-fulfilling prophecy

when an initially inaccurate expectation leades to actions that cause the expectation to come true

Self-serving bias

the tendency to take personal credit for our sucesses and to blame external factors for our failures